Butcher's Road (37 page)

A quick sec after disappearing into the office behind the counter, the clerk reappeared, holding a large black umbrella in his bony fingers.

“One guest’s misfortune is another guest’s boon,” he said happily, handing the thing to Lennon.

He thanked the clerk and left the hotel. By the time he reached the near corner, the rainfall had ended, but dampness hung in the air dense and heavy.

Lennon had a fine sense of direction and he’d memorized the map he’d carried with him from Chicago, so in less than ten minutes he was standing before the gate to Hollis Rossington’s home, peering in through the wrought ironwork at the lush foliage blanketing the walls and spilling from pots. The layout of the property struck him as strange, with the main entrance to the residence being the narrow gate. It was isolating, prisonlike.

Before he rang the bell, Lennon had some decisions to make. He’d come to New Orleans to warn Butch, to give the wrestler the lowdown on where he stood in the world—which was pretty damn low—but he could muck up the works if he didn’t handle this thing right. Rossington had to know something about what was going on, and he wasn’t likely to welcome a stranger in, not if that stranger was asking for Butch Cardinal. He could strong-arm his way through the door, using his police credentials, but that might make matters worse. He didn’t want a ruckus, and he didn’t want to spook Cardinal into running off. Lennon stepped away from the gate and observed his surroundings. Two-story buildings. A lot of these courtyard jobbies. Narrow streets. He might be able to loiter on the corner and keep an eye on things, but there was no place to blend into the scenery, making an extended surveillance of the property a bust. If he were in Chicago he could park a car at the curb and pretend to read the paper, but he didn’t have a car. In no time flat, anyone exiting that gate or coming down one of the intersecting streets would spot him and have plenty of time to turn tail.

Rethinking his plan, Lennon turned and walked back to his hotel. He used the phone in the lobby and asked the operator to connect him with Hollis Rossington’s home. The bell rang a dozen times before he hung up.

Instead of returning to his room, Lennon wandered back into the street. The damp air felt heavier. Soon enough, the rain would return to batter the city in violent sheets, but he felt restless and needed to be in motion. He walked the streets, marveling at the low buildings of the French Quarter and thinking they looked somehow false, like the sets of a play, particularly against the grim, charcoal-gray sky. After an hour he decided he should eat something, and he asked a shopkeeper where he might get some supper. The clerk sent him to an oyster house a block off Bourbon Street. The inside of the restaurant was dark with beams and pillars painted black. It didn’t look particularly clean, and the menu seemed to have been written, at least partially, in code with a number of dishes he’d never heard of before. Since Lennon had never formed a taste for oysters, he questioned the waiter, who recommended a shrimp dish that Lennon couldn’t pronounce. Lennon agreed that that sounded fine. Just before his meal was served a jazz trio began to play in another part of the restaurant. The music had a peppy tempo, but it still managed to sound melancholy. Lennon, who had never heard much New Orleans jazz, found himself lost in the music and enjoying it far more than he would have expected.

He finished his meal and ordered a coffee. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on his chair. The rain marched in, following a roar of thunder that rolled down the street. Hissing and rapping, the rain sounded good with the music, sounded right.

He liked this place. Unlike the joints he frequented in Chicago, the restaurant didn’t make him feel like he was on a stage, being watched, being judged.

Following his third cup of coffee, Lennon decided he had to leave the restaurant. He hadn’t come all the way to New Orleans to eat shrimp and listen to music. He paid his bill, visited the men’s room, and then smoked a last cigarette, standing in the doorway beneath a broad awning that shielded him from the rain.

That was when he saw the two men, men he recognized from Lonnie Musante’s house, men who had questioned him and threatened the lives of his family. Their names were Hayes and Brand.

The two men had just turned onto the street when Lennon flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter. The sight of them was startling to be sure, but Lennon had assumed they would cross paths again, and he was grateful that he’d seen them first. Hayes and Brand shared an umbrella and walked shoulder to shoulder toward him. Engrossed in conversation, neither man noticed Lennon in the restaurant doorway. He slipped back into the restaurant and waited for Hayes and Brand to pass. Once they did, he gave a thirty-second lead and then he followed them through the rain.

If someone had asked Hollis in that moment whether he was happy or not, he would have certainly said, “Yes,” but he didn’t know if it was the contentment of a satisfied man or the bliss of a desperate wanderer seeing the promise of a mirage on the horizon. Butch continued to surprise him, and while most of the surprises had been good ones, they also put Hollis off his balance. At first Butch had condemned the intimacies of men and had done so vehemently. Then he’d thrown himself into the very affections he’d denounced. He seemed insatiable for them. Hollis could understand how this might happen, but the ease with which Butch had adjusted to this change in attitude was unquestionably odd. Hollis had been with enough men—warriors against their own needs—that almost no reaction, not even outright violence, would have surprised him. What had surprised him was Butch’s acceptance of the situation. No excuses or accusations. No denial. It was as if he’d lived his life believing the sky was green, arguing it to anyone who might listen, and then one morning rising to discover it was blue and having no discernible conflict over the discovery.

Hollis closed the ledger on his desk. The club would open in thirty minutes. He would shake hands and smile, but he wanted to be at home. He wanted to be in bed with the wrestler. He hated leaving the man for even a handful of hours. Part of this was his fear that Butch’s moral calibration might revert to the conservative in the hours of Hollis’s absence, but mostly it was the feeling—a feeling he hadn’t had in ages—of sharing a bed with a man with whom he genuinely wanted to spend time. He’d never felt that with Lionel Lowery. The kid had been eager and convenient, but never prized, at least not by Hollis.

That wasn’t to say he saw nothing but a pot of gold in Butch. He couldn’t even say their relationship was a good idea. The physical attraction couldn’t be denied. Even for an athlete, Butch’s physique was exceptional. Having a handsome face on top of all the muscle didn’t hurt things either. Granted, Butch’s mind wasn’t as open as some. He constantly needed to know the rules, but his mind obviously wasn’t a tin drum, sealed with welds and rust. When he spoke about the life he’d lost, Hollis felt nothing but misery for him, because Butch had been ground down undeservingly. Of course, this was the epoch of battered humanity. Millions of people around the world had been unfairly diminished. Still Hollis found Butch’s fall from grace heartbreaking, perhaps because it had closely resembled Hollis’s own descent. He felt a unity with the man, but he wasn’t blinded by it. Butch had popped off about magic, and then had shut down tight as a clam. Was that sane behavior? It certainly wasn’t stable. Plus there was the bounty on Butch’s head, not to mention the murder rap. By sheltering the man, Hollis was making himself an accessory to murder and a target. None of which made Butch Cardinal the trophy many would claim for their own.

The bartender, Michael, poked his head in the office and said, “Remy is outside with our shipment. He wants to talk to you.”

Great, thought Hollis. What kind of nonsense was the thug going to be dishing out today?

“Fine,” Hollis said, pushing himself away from the desk.

Remy Long was a short, round man with a scarred face and eyes as blue as a summer sky, like two pristine ponds surrounded by a war-torn landscape. Though the acne scars covered more surface than the knife scars, the ragged, ugly lines running from Remy’s nose to his jaw, shining and broad like snail trails, did far more to destroy his appearance. He would have been an ugly man even without the horrible welts; with them, he appeared monstrous.

Hollis held out his hand and Remy shook it. Behind the gangster, two down-and-outs hoisted boxes from the back of Remy’s Ford and hauled them across the alley to Michael’s waiting hands.

“Got a break in the rain,” Remy said.

“Won’t last,” Hollis told him.

“I can see you’re shitting sunshine today,” Remy said. He removed a box of matches from his coat and a stub of cigar. Once he had it lit, he pointed the butt at Hollis. “Had to dip into your shipment this time around,” Remy said. “Some of our whiskey got hung up in Biloxi, and we’ve got to spread what we’ve got out.”

“Keep it all,” Hollis said. Relieved to have some good news. “We’re doing fine on stock.”

“You sure?” Remy asked. “Won’t be back for another week, you know.”

“Not a problem.”

“There’s still a delivery fee to consider.”

“Naturally,” Hollis said.

“Let’s go inside and have a drink. We can discuss it.”

The request was uncommon and put Hollis on edge. Remy was one of the few people associated with his business to whom he didn’t owe money, and the thug had made his distaste for Hollis and his club clear on more than one occasion. More times than not, he didn’t even accompany his men on deliveries to the club, and when he did he kept his ass parked in the car. So what was the sudden interest in a drink? In conversation?

Whatever the motivation for the uncharacteristic request, Hollis knew better than to speak up about it. Hollis instructed Michael to help Remy’s men haul the crates of liquor back to the man’s Ford. Then he took a bottle from behind the bar and led Remy Long down the L-shaped hall, past the sketches of performers that decorated the walls. The women and the boys in gowns had been caricatured by a local artist who had used to frequent Lady Victoria’s.

“All these cunts are men?” Remy asked, tapping his cigar against one of the frames and sending a shower of ash to the floor.

Hollis flinched at the disgusting comment but said, “Only about half.”

“I think I’d have to gut any guy that made my dick hard,” Remy replied.

Hollis chuckled dryly and pushed open the door to his office. Hollis couldn’t remember a single time they’d met that Remy hadn’t made some similarly offensive remark, as if the grotesque man thought himself alluring and needed to draw a line.

He retrieved glasses from his desk drawer and poured two fingers of whiskey into each of them.

“To your health,” Hollis said.

“Good enough,” the gangster replied. He took a slug of the whiskey and then puffed heavily on his cigar, creating a blue fog around his damaged face. “We got something to talk about.”

“Do we?” Hollis said.

“We’ve got a ruckus going on up in Chicago. Well, fuck, there’s always a ruckus going on up there. A bunch of shit-for-brains hotheads, if you ask me. I heard they had a street war, but it didn’t sound like much more than a girlie slap fight. It got shut down pretty fast, so now they’re just killing each other casual-like, same as always. But there’s been word that the guy who created that ruckus might be crawling around New Orleans.”

Hollis sipped from his glass. He shrugged, trying to mask his nervousness. “I don’t really have any connections to Chicago. You got a picture or something? You want me to keep an eye out for this guy?”

“I heard there was a wrestler involved. Didn’t you used to be in that game?”

“Yeah,” Hollis said. “Long time ago.”

“So maybe you know this guy.”

“Could be. You got a name?”

“He goes by Cardinal. They used to call him the Butcher. You still know people in that racket?”

“A few,” Hollis said.

“Well, if you hear anything, you give me a call. We might both find ourselves with a nice Christmas bonus.” Eyes still slit, Remy returned to puffing on his stogie and stared at Hollis intently through the fog.

“You don’t hear about those kinds of things down here,” Hollis said. “The killings, I mean. You read the papers, and you think every corner in Chicago must have a corpse on it.”

“Louisiana boys keep things quieter,” Remy said. “They’re discreet, and they got the Mississippi toilet out there to flush their shit away. A body hits that current and it’s like the guy never existed. If they got the time, they take a trip to the bayou to feed the gators. Chicago’s one big pissing match between the Irish and the Italians. They’re always
making examples
and
sending messages
, but down here, boys just want to get their business done and slide into something warm at the end of the day. Now before I forget, I’m gonna need that delivery charge.”

The gangster quoted his price, exorbitant of course, but still a relief compared to what a full shipment would have set him back. Hollis went to his safe and retrieved the cash, handed it to the ugly man, who counted it before sliding the bills into his jacket pocket. The conversation waned quickly after the transaction was completed. Neither man was particularly interested in the other’s opinions about politics or picture shows, and they’d already discussed the weather. Remy emptied his glass for the third time and then clamped the cigar between his teeth. He stood from the chair, wobbled a bit, and then slapped on his hat.